Meet the Dedicated Volunteers Who Honor World War II’s Fallen American Service Members by Adopting Their Graves
Europe will commemorate the 80th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s surrender on May 8. But thousands of locals remain committed to preserving year-round the memories of those killed while fighting to liberate the continent
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November marks a busy month for Mathilde Schmetz.
In addition to her volunteer job running a World War II museum in Thimister-Clermont, Belgium, the 75-year-old makes frequent visits to the nearby Henri-Chapelle American Cemetery and Memorial for what she considers her “duty”: honoring 14 wartime graves that she and her husband have adopted.
Most of the soldiers interred in these graves died in November 1944. Every November, Schmetz and the volunteers she recruits to help her—sometimes students or members of the American military stationed just over the border in Germany—follow the same steps to commemorate these men: Place a bouquet of red, white and blue flowers in front of the gravestone. Rub sand from Normandy, France, into the inscribed names and dates to make them stand out against the white marble. Say a few words of gratitude. And, finally, take a photograph of each decorated grave, which Schmetz then mails to the soldier’s family or loved ones back in the United States.
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“Every family gets a picture with their Christmas letter—not by email, a regular letter,” Schmetz says. “The soldiers did their duty, and our duty is, at least, to remember what they did for us.”
Schmetz is one of thousands of Europeans who have adopted the graves of U.S. military service members buried or honored in cemeteries in Belgium, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and other countries. Amid various commemorative events held across Europe to mark the 80th anniversary of World War II’s end there on May 8, 1945, such efforts—some part of structured, longstanding programs, others more individually driven—offer a touching layer of history that takes many visitors and even seasoned war experts by surprise.
Dallas-based historian Robert M. Edsel was one of the scholars astonished upon learning about the grave adoption programs—specifically, the one at the Netherlands American Cemetery and Memorial, located in the country’s southernmost tip, a few miles from the German border, where approximately 10,000 U.S. troops are memorialized. Edsel is the author, with Bret Witter, of the best-selling 2009 book The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History, which tells the story of the art historians and museum personnel who rescued art stolen by the Nazis during the war; the book was adapted into a 2014 movie starring George Clooney and Matt Damon.
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One of the Monuments Men from Edsel’s book, Captain Walter Huchthausen, was killed on April 2, 1945, in Aachen, Germany, and buried at the Netherlands Cemetery. Edsel had visited Huchthausen’s grave several times and became pen pals with the Dutch woman looking after it, but he only learned from her later that a much bigger phenomenon was in place. He was so moved by the longstanding display of commemoration—“a high-water mark of civilization,” as he describes it to Smithsonian magazine—and so astounded by its lack of wider recognition that he decided to spotlight it in his new book, Remember Us: American Sacrifice, Dutch Freedom and a Forever Promise Forged in World War II, which is available in both English and Dutch.
“The Dutch did something nobody else has done, and from an organic effort, have honored and taken care of these soldiers now for 80 years,” Edsel says. “The fact that they’re honored and remembered, and that [adopters] drill into their kids what freedom is and where it came from, that it’s not free, and these are the people who pay for it—that’s a story. And if ever the world needed that story, now is the moment.”
Burying the hundreds of thousands of U.S. service members who died during World War II was a monumental task. On June 8, 1944, the U.S. First Army established the first American military cemetery on European soil as a resting place for the U.S. soldiers who lost their lives during the D-Day invasion, including on Omaha Beach, the deadliest of the five Allied landing spots. On a bluff high above the bloodstained shores, service units—often made up of African American soldiers—began the arduous process of digging graves.
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Today, the Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial serves as the final resting place for 9,389 service members killed while fighting to liberate Europe from the Nazis. Another 1,557 names are listed on the Walls of the Missing. With more than 2.2 million annual visitors, the site is the most visited one run by the American Battle Monuments Commission, the federal agency established in 1923 that operates and maintains 26 cemeteries and 31 monuments and memorials in 17 countries, including the U.S.
More than half of those cemeteries are located in Europe, with most memorializing those who served in World War II. However, not all have grave adoption programs, and there’s no overarching U.S. agency or organization that coordinates the process. Instead, various volunteer and nonprofit groups in Europe have taken up the task.
At Normandy, the nonprofit Les Fleurs de la Mémoire, founded in 2001, handles grave adoption. The American Overseas Memorial Day Association, a public-private organization, encourages people with a special connection to a particular service member at any of several cemeteries in Belgium to become his or her “Sentinel of Memory.” At the Epinal American Cemetery and Memorial in France, local “godmothers” and “godfathers” who adopt a grave (or a name on the Court of Honor) through the volunteer-run U.S. Memory Grand Est France receive a printed certificate. The nonprofit’s website also provides step-by-step instructions on how to order flowers to be delivered to a specific grave.
But the adoption program at the Netherlands Cemetery is by far the most robust and longstanding of them all. It traces its roots to 1944, when the bodies of thousands of U.S. troops began piling up for burial in temporary graves in a fruit orchard near the small village of Margraten, just a few miles from the German border.
In early 1945, even as the war raged on, the mayor of Margraten formed a committee of concerned townspeople hoping to find a way to honor their fallen liberators, giving birth to the grave adoption program. Soon, locals began stepping forward and volunteered to become adopters. By the second Memorial Day ceremony in 1946, all of the approximately 18,000 graves had been adopted. “No fallen American has been left without a mourner,” Edsel writes in the prologue of Remember Us.
The remains of about 10,000 service members buried at the cemetery during the war were eventually repatriated to the U.S. Today, 8,291 Americans are still buried in graves arranged in gently curved rows of Italian marble crosses and Stars of David, with another 1,722 names inscribed on the Walls of the Missing, exactly how the dead are memorialized in other American Battle Monuments Commission cemeteries. All of these graves (and those of two civilians, both Red Cross workers, also buried at Margraten), along with every name on the Walls of the Missing, have each been adopted by a local Dutch family, individual or school.
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According to Edsel and other historians, the events of the war during the fall and winter of 1944 played an important role in establishing the longevity and success of Margraten’s adoption program. American troops first liberated the southern part of the Netherlands in mid-September, after four and a half years of occupation by Nazi Germany. As a result, American forces remained closely intertwined with local Dutch communities for months leading up to major Allied operations into neighboring Germany in late 1944 and early 1945, such as Operation Market Garden, the largest airborne drop in military history. Many Dutch people knew the individuals whose graves they would soon adopt, laying the foundation for deep bonds of both grief and gratitude.
The Foundation for Adopting Graves at the American Cemetery Margraten has run the Dutch town’s program since 2002. Adopters pay a one-time fee of €10 (around $11) and commit to at least two visits per year, though many come more often. The foundation closed the waiting list in 2021, when it grew to 1,000 names. According to foundation secretary Frans Roebroeks, more than 700 hopeful adopters remain on the list, with between 30 and 60 graves becoming available each year. Many Dutch families, including his own, have cared for the graves of the same soldiers for several generations. “It’s a bit in our DNA,” Roebroeks says.
Many adopters go to great lengths to honor their service members. Sebastiaan Vonk, a war expert based in the Netherlands and the founder of the Fields of Honor Foundation, a nonprofit that has compiled an online database of more than 43,000 U.S. soldiers memorialized in Europe, recalls one couple who named their firstborn child after the soldier they adopted. When he was born, they brought flowers to the soldier’s grave, placed the baby’s birth announcement on it and took photos.
“It’s very telling [about] the sort of relationships between families in the United States and the Netherlands, and also how deeply people feel connected to soldiers,” says Vonk, who has adopted three soldiers in the Netherlands and Belgium.
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For grave adopters and the loved ones of fallen U.S. troops, connecting with each other can be a deeply moving experience.
Schmetz, who is in regular contact with relatives or loved ones of all but one of her adopted service members, says meeting next of kin is an especially profound reminder of the Americans’ ultimate sacrifices. She often meets them at the cemetery or during their visits to the Remember Museum 39-45, which she and her husband, Marcel Schmetz, opened in 1994. (The donation-only museum contains thousands of personal items left by 110 soldiers from the First Infantry Division on Marcel’s family farm before departing for the Battle of the Bulge, from which many never returned.)
“I’m always touched to see how they still miss their fathers,” Schmetz says. “People don’t realize behind every soldier was a family suffering. When you meet those people, and you talk with them, then you realize we can never do enough.”
Meanwhile, for some Americans, adopters provide a critical link to loved ones they never had the chance to meet. Debbie Holloman, a retiree who lives in Virginia, witnessed the power of such relationships firsthand when she was about 12 years old. Her uncle, Eddie Hart, a private first class in the Army and a Purple Heart recipient, was killed in action at age 22 in April 1945; a Dutch woman named Betty Vrancken adopted his grave at Margraten. Holloman joined other family members when her grandmother—Hart’s mother—met Vrancken for the first time in 1967.
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“She just sat there and held Betty’s hand, and it was so touching,” Holloman recalls. “My little old grandmother, it was like the only way she could get close to her son again, to touch this woman who had adopted his grave.”
For the past decade, Holloman has served as a liaison between adopters in Europe and families in the U.S. She estimates she’s helped about 200 families or loved ones connect with their service member’s adopters, mostly those with graves at Margraten and Henri-Chapelle. She’s also a volunteer with the Fields of Honor Foundation and the Faces of Margraten, a project by the foundation that Vonk launched to find a photo of every person memorialized at the cemetery (so far, it’s found about 9,000).
As World War II recedes further into the past, the task of tracking down next of kin and other information about U.S. forces is becoming tougher for volunteers like Holloman. Therein lies further incentive for proponents of grave adoption programs dedicated to honoring Americans who died while serving their country: making sure their memories are never forgotten, even during an especially polarizing moment in U.S. history.
“This is a bigger story than one American president, or two American presidents or two cycles of an American president,” says Rob O’Brien, an Amsterdam-based writer and filmmaker whose documentary about Margraten’s adoption program is slated to be released this fall. “This is 80 years of people visiting and paying their respects. It’s as strong as oak. No one can break that.”
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